“What does ‘Independence’ mean?”: The African Transcreator and the Configuration of the Nation-Space in Ama Ata Aidoo’s No Sweetness Here

Abstract

Published in 1970, the stories that give shape to No Sweetness Here encompass the historical period that goes from Ghana’s independence under the leadership of Nkwame Nkrumah in 1957 until the coup d’état that marked the demise of the man himself in 1966. Aidoo’s dissection of Ghana’s national past is to be inserted as part of the “writing-the-nation” project (Bhabha, 1990) whereby postcolonial authors, following Anderson’s precept, imagine their heterogeneous, ambivalent and strangely modern communities (Anderson, 1983). However, Aidoo’s particular national narration is decidedly subversive in both its gendered approach and its generic deviation. This article proposes a reading of No Sweetness Here as an African fefewo, a whole dramatic performance, which Aidoo translates into English against the backdrop of a clearly feminist agenda. Hence, the African transcreation that ensues restores the original African writing to the literary palimpsest of what appear to be eleven discrete short stories.